“... she was leaving open. The historian Seth Stein LeJacq has calculated that her brothers Francis and Charles, both of whom became admirals, served on at least ten naval sodomy trials between them, eight of these before Mansfield Park was published. And she wasn’t too delicate to risk such an allusion. Many years after Austen’s death, her favourite ...”

“... portrait by his UN colleague Brian Urquhart, and a perceptive study by the Berkeley historian Charles Henry that treats Bunche both as a significant figure in his own right and as a prism through which to examine America’s racial preoccupations. But no one has yet given Bunche the kind of magisterial treatment David Levering Lewis gave Du Bois. In his ...”

“... from Saussure and French structuralism – which descends from the American pragmatist philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce. Here the main stress is not so much on achieving a unified general theory as on getting people (theorists included) to recognise the variety of meanings and purposes at work in human communication. For Peirce, there is no end to the ...”

“... Bowles and John F. Kennedy. The right wing of the organisation was awash with antisemitism and Charles Lindbergh worship, but most of its followers eventually accepted the task of defeating Nazism. Arriving at Yale after the war, Buckley and his fellow conservative students knew that they faced a more unifying foe in Soviet communism. Buckley strutted the ...”

“... by medals or publicity, is asked of those who, when filthy, hungry and exhausted, often without hope of relief or even survival, hold positions against repeated attacks or prolonged shelling, and can still overcome doubt and fear enough to function. It is this less flashy form of courage that is more useful in high command. By the end of the war, MacArthur ...”

“... communism’ and against US citizenship for Natives, while the Santee Dakota doctor Charles Eastman believed that Native Americans could have a productive relationship as US nationals while retaining cultural autonomy. Other Natives embraced the terms of integration, such as Eastman’s contemporary, the Kaw ...”

“... the Promised Land’. Nearly forty years later anti-Union resentment was strong enough to carry Charles Edward Stuart close to an overthrow not just of the Treaty but of the Hanoverian state. Only after the 1745 rebellion did conditions improve enough to resemble the changes promised an earlier generation. This time-lapse is another feature which places the ...”

“... Mothers get in the way in fiction: they take up space that is better occupied by indecision, by hope, by the slow growth of a personality, and – as the novel itself develops – by the idea of solitude. It becomes important to the novel that its key scenes should occur when the heroine is alone, with no one to protect her, no one to confide in, no ...”

“... in me: ‘I’d like to be buried in a little grave right next to yours.’ When I say that I hope this won’t be quite yet she says, ‘Well, I’m the same age as you,’ as if this somehow made our posthumous propinquity more of a likelihood. 27 May. Ashcroft, the US attorney general, applies for the extradition of Abu Hamza, the radical Muslim ...”

“... Rotters’ Club.5 The last, and most famous, was the Inklings, with C.S. Lewis (‘Jack’) and Charles Williams, at Oxford in the 1930s. On this subject, Humphrey Carpenter’s 1978 study, The Inklings, last revised in 1997, is the place to start.Religion: Mabel, his widowed mother, was a Roman Catholic convert, and Tolkien at least believed that her Low ...”

“... what I thought of Hitler’, and she was intensely proud of the British Empire. According to Sir Charles Powell, probably the most influential private secretary she had in Downing Street, the Prime Minister was in thrall to childhood memories. ‘For a small girl growing up in Grantham the Germans were about as evil as anything you could think of.’ In that ...”

“... to survive and write his major work, the Discorsi. But while Brecht was reworking the play with Charles Laughton in 1945, the first nuclear bomb was dropped at Hiroshima, and he felt that ‘overnight the biography of the founder of modern physics read differently.’ Because, as he said, ‘the atomic bomb has really made the relationship between society ...”

“... life from his literary output: fact and fiction repeatedly inform each other. He told Charles Scribner II, his publisher, that his next novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), concerned ‘the life of one Anthony Patch between his 25th and 33rd years. He is one of those many with the tastes and weaknesses of an artist but with no actual creative ...”

“... of ecstasy and the recurring moments of horror’. Eliot identifies the presence of the latter in Charles Williams’s novel All Hallows’ Eve, in which he claims there is no ‘exploitation of the supernatural for the sake of the immediate shudder’. There are shudder-inducing images of horror in Eliot’s play The Family Reunion, figures of nightmare and ...”

“... Kossuth; from the brilliant conservative liberal social theorist, historian and politician Alexis-Charles-Henri-Clérel de Tocqueville, to the troubled priest Félicité de Lamennais, whose ultimately unsuccessful struggle to reconcile his faith with his politics made him one of the most famous thinkers in the pre-1848 world; from George Sand, who refused to ...”